


The Mother of the Guardian of the Swallow

by Anoke



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Aiden (The Witcher) - Freeform, Child Neglect, Coën (The Witcher) - Freeform, Destiny, Destiny is a Bitch, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Lambert (The Witcher) - Freeform, Letho (The Witcher), Mild Gore, Other Mages - Freeform, Premonitions, Sort Of, The Witcher 3 Spoilers, The Witcher Netflix Series Spoilers, White Frost (The Witcher), Witcher-Typical Child Abuse, Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg - Freeform, other witchers - Freeform, the world is fucked without geralt as a witcher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:21:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24950728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anoke/pseuds/Anoke
Summary: Visenna realizes she is only one part of a far larger destiny.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 71





	The Mother of the Guardian of the Swallow

**Author's Note:**

> h e l p

Three nights after Visenna realized she was pregnant, she woke screaming. Terror had visited her in the darkness; she had dreamed of a girl, younger than the blood-soaked Falka who had only just been executed on the turn of the year, but with an eerie echo of her look—a girl who had drowned the Continent in blood, and who ice had followed like a shadow, freezing over the rotten battlefields she had left in her wake. Visenna had been shaken, but it was not until the nightmare repeated the next moon that she realized it was an omen. Why it had come to her, she could not say; she was no court mage, to watch the heart-children of Queen Rhiannon and King Goidemar for signs of Falka’s blood—and even if she was, her heart wailed at the thought of killing a child for the crime of their parentage.

The dreams became ever more frequent as her pregnancy progressed, and she racked her mind trying to determine if, perhaps, _her_ child had some part in her bloody visions of the future. But the child’s father she had met treating soldiers who had been fighting _against_ Falka’s bloodthirsty army, and he had been as base-born as she, despite the gentle countenance and manner that had so charmed her. She might have suspected some form of magical interference, that he could get her with child—mages who did not have their reproductive systems entirely removed like those poor women of Aretuza still had all too difficult a time conceiving children—but she had run as many diagnostic spells as she could the day and after she had realized, and had detected nothing. As far as she could determine, her babe was completely normal.

As she was entering the last third of her pregnancy, _something_ changed. A young griffin, likely driven from its parents’ territory, settled in the mountains near her village. The villagers begged her for aid, but she could not do more than heal those wounded but not yet dead from the monster; she was not able to take on the beast in her state. They took her apologies with better grace than they might have, but tensions were high as the season turned to autumn.

And then the Witcher came.

His hair and beard were starting to go grey, which told Visenna he was likely one of the oldest of his kind. Despite his prowess he was not welcomed as he might have once been; the Witchers had been so effective in the two centuries since they had been created that folk were already beginning to forget the desperate need they had been created to fill. When the other villagers balked at giving him room, Visenna offered him up her own bed and hearth, and logged the distressed looks of her villagers as they imagined the man—and man he was, despite the bloodlines of monsters irrevocably intertwined with his own—offering her harm. She would have to work on that.

He echoed her memories of her babe’s father, in some ways, despite the difference in education and power. He was almost painfully courteous, clearly attempting to deprive himself in every possible aspect until she pressed more upon him. She had more than enough for herself, almost every winter, and at this harvest the villagers had pressed even more upon her than usual, as gifts to keep her babe healthy. She was prepared to give back in the depths of winter, but the reticence of the people she knew so well turned something in her bitter, and in place she did not leave the Witcher—Vesemir—wanting.

He took the little coin they could afford upon killing the griffin—far too little for the month or more he dallied with them—and left with a smile; but Visenna, prompted by what she had, at the time, taken to be sympathy, took his hand and swore she would repay him in kind for the good he had done for them someday.

In the moon remaining to her child's birth her dreams came rapidly, and shifted. Vesemir led a terrifyingly deplenished group of all the schools of Witchers, only identifiable by their cat eyes and their deep scars, standing against the ashen-haired girl with the look of Falka and dying, to a single man. She wept until her eyes felt like they must dry out with it, but every eve she found a new well to plumb, as her visions focused on each of the Witchers in turn. A Wolven man who would have been a mage if given the opportunity, his soul torn out of him by the deaths of all his year-mates and burned out and to his death by his attempts to push himself to counter the girl’s terrible magic; a Wolf boy lacking only a decade from the man, but shredded by yet _more_ loss; a light-haired Cat upon whose death both the Wolf pup and the other Cats threw themselves into the fray as though their lives no longer mattered; a pox-scarred Griffin who lingered, deathless but useless, for far too long before the reaper finally visited mercy upon him; three Vipers in the grass who were still inadequate to take on the girl like Falka; and far, far, _far_ too many more.

She dreaded the birth of her child, as terrible as she felt for it.

The day she woke with contractions beginning, the dreams assaulted her waking as well. Mages she had never met burned and froze in the fire of the girl’s wake, and not even the one violet-eyed sorceress whose pain reached in similar tenors to the girl’s could wake her. Gold-rimed blood swept over the world in her mind, and finally the girl with Falka’s look turned and saw the ice following her; and despite her deeds Visenna screamed with her when the ice devoured her whole.

* * *

When Visenna woke from her dreams, she was cradling her child in her arms. Their hair was red like her own, and eyes truly blue, nothing like the ashen hair and violently green eyes of the girl, and Visenna wept again that her child would not be the harbinger of the end of the world. For one night she slept peacefully, her babe at her breast.

From then on her visions took wild turns. Her baby, her _darling_ , eased the horrors; she still dreamed of disaster, but less and less was it the girl of Falka’s look wreaking havoc before the ice devoured everything in its path. Instead, perhaps, a black sun devoured the sky and the girl, or an orange-tinged madness from Redania, or a sickly blue from Temeria; but in every dream, the ice came, and _none_ could stand before it.

When her child, her _son_ , her _**Geralt**_ , turned two years of age, she had the first dream that did not end only in ice.

The Witchers had reappeared; but among them was a Wolven man she had never seen before. His hair was ghostly white and his skin was paler even than Visenna’s own, and he cradled the body of Falka’s descendant in his arms like she was his own child before slaying a cold army all on his lonesome, dying with a look in his eyes that Visenna had seen among those parents who had outlived their children. The world had still fallen, but living creatures still existed, in the edges; this white Wolf had somehow _changed_ what was to be.

Visenna woke with a sense of dread and hope that exceeded anything that she had ever felt in her entire life.

The future appeared almost irrevocably _mutable_ from that point onwards, but the white-haired Wolf Witcher was the critical point. His presence—or absence—was a point upon which the future hung. Twice, she dreamed of Falka’s girl triumphant over the ice; one branch splintered, and in the second the white Wolf threw himself in shreds to a monster he would not feel inadequate dying against.

She excised her tears and her fears by loving her son. _Her_ babe, with so much of her looks and even more of his father’s chivalry. Geralt was the brightest light in all her days, even when he was being as contrary and stubborn as a three-year-old could be.

And yet.

It came on but slowly, where the white Wolf Witcher began fading again from her visions, and the blood returned. She turned desperately to foretelling, which she had never before been able to purposely conjure visions from, but it told only the same tale; the white Wolf was fading from possibility, and with him any hope for the world.

The day she realized _Geralt_ was the white Wolf of her dreams was the closest she had ever felt to dying.

* * *

It was near the end of Geralt’s third year the answer came, and pain with it. The villagers spoke bitterly of a neighbor’s child, who had been _stolen_ (their words, their words only—) by the Witchers. Visenna spoke to them, spoke of the great trading of a life for a life, and while she thought perhaps they went away satisfied, she did not. In her dreams that night she saw the Wolf Vesemir; he was begging her for something which she did not fully realize she was withholding.

“Why do you keep him from me?!” the gray Wolf cried, and she could only answer with sorrowful frustration; but then she saw the great white Wolf’s shoulders bared behind him, and with a chill nearly as overpowering as the all-consuming ice, she recognized the sparse pigmented marks on his chest.

“Geralt?” she whispered, and the white Wolf looked to her in what was first confusion but melted rapidly into longing.

“Wolf—” Vesemir said, warningly, and Visenna _saw_.

She likely screamed. Certainly she woke to her baby clutching her close, attempting to comfort _her_ , instead of trusting to his mother to dispel all the shadows within imagination.

She clutched him as closely as she dared, tears falling into his hair. Her debt was come due; and it called with it everything that she held most dear.

She resisted almost a full year before she gave in. The year was not easy in the least; the world-ending nightmares came more and more frequently, until she could not look at her son without seeing the death of men and women who she had come to cherish nearly as well as he would himself, if he lived.

The would-have-been mage, the shredded pup, and the deeply hurt woman with the violet eyes would perhaps yet meet her son, if she did not give him over to Vesemir; and yet the cost would be too much, in any configuration. Her boy would not show gleamings of mage-work until he was an octogenarian, if that, and he would not be alive and present to somehow affect the fate of Falka’s progeny _as a human._

In the summer before her boy turned four, she lent a cart and horse and set out for the foothills of the Blue Mountains.

Two days before she reached the bottom of the trail, she was able to contact the mage at Kaer Morhen, the School of the Wolves. He didn't understand, but he didn’t need to. He only needed to send down a Witcher, to collect her baby, her Geralt. He would come under the eye of Vesemir soon enough, and Vesemir would do what Geralt’s father was unable to do and Visenna was not comfortable enough to do, and there would be a slim, slim chance that her son would save the world.

She wasn’t vain enough to believe that anything she had taught him during their time together could affect what he might do in the future—but she couldn’t help but hope.

**Author's Note:**

> I did NOT mean to write this, but...
> 
> (I personally believe that Visenna didn't get anything anywhere _near_ this clear, but I started writing this and I... couldn't... stop...?)
> 
> ((also yes, I know Ciri probably isn't actually Falka's descendant but that doesn't stop her from almost becoming the tool of the woman's bloody vengeance on the Continent.))


End file.
